Sites:
SharePoint:Out of the Box Features- The capability to store and retrieve both list and document content in an easy and flexible way with connectivity to the Microsoft Office client applications.SharePoint:Extensibility Points-Web Parts, Master Pages, Pages, Delegate Controls, InfoPath Forms, and solutions leveraging the Word File Conversion Service. Access Services for deploying Access solutions to SharePoint.
Communities:
SharePoint:Out of the Box Features-The capability to locate and interact with people through expertise, relationships, tagging, and rating of content.
SharePoint:Extensibility Points-Predefined searches, search web parts, tagging interfaces, rating interfaces, and custom user interfaces.
Content:
SharePoint:Out of the Box Features-The capability to manage content whether that content is a web page, a document, or a set of documents and records management of the content that is created.
SharePoint:Extensibility Points-Custom page types, field controls, content types, document sets, remote blog storage providers, workflows and Word Services. Records management extensibility and Public Web Sites extensibility.
Search:
SharePoint:Out of the Box Features-The capability to search content inside and outside of SharePoint including information in structured database systems.
SharePoint:Extensibility Points-Predefined search result transformations, web parts leveraging search for navigation and location of content, and connections to back end systems. Also IFilters and Protocol Handlers.
Insights:
SharePoint:Out of the Box Feature-The capability to leverage Excel to access and display data on a web page, Dashboards, and Key Performance Indicators to transform raw data into actionable information.
SharePoint:Extensibility Points-Excel Services, Excel User defined functions, key performance indicators, and dashboards
Composite:
SharePoint:Out of the Box Feature-The capability for business users to create their own solutions through connection and arrangement of the features of the platform.
SharePoint:Extensibility Points-Web parts, workflows and InfoPath Forms Services that increase the tools available for the end user.
User Interface
The look and feel of SharePoint has radically changed from earlier versions of the product. In addition to being more accessible to the user it allows for improved extension points and fewer workarounds. The new user interface components that you can extend and build applications with include the fluent UI ribbon and an extensible dialog system. Figure shows the new home page for the default team site template in edit mode.
Building User Interface
SharePoint 2010 leverages wiki concepts for managing content and extends these concepts by allowing for the inclusion of web parts within the wiki pages themselves. In previous versions you were allowed to add web parts to web part zones. In SharePoint 2010 the developer (and the user) has compete control of the user interface including the placement of web parts anywhere on the page. For instance, this means that it is possible to put the results of a survey next to text describing the survey. So the results of code and content can be comingled on the page to create rich live content scenarios. Multi-Browser Support
Microsoft says they recognize the need to support multiple browsers such as Safari and FireFox.
SharePoint 2010 Ribbon
The context sensitive ribbon interface is now integrated into the SharePoint 2010 user experience. Your applications can extend the ribbon interface to include new menu items and options both on a global level and based on the context of the user. Following figure shows how SharePoint changes the ribbon when a user selects a list web part. The arrow shows the addition of the List Tools section to the ribbon when the list web part is selected.
SharePoint 2010 Dialog Framework
A serious challenge in user interface design for the web is the long page refresh times and the constant switching of context from one page to another. SharePoint 2010 has solved these concerns through the use of AJAX requests for partial updates and by providing a flexible popup dialog framework that allows you to pop up entry boxes on top of the existing page. Instead of having users navigate to a new page and then come back after the data entry is completed the user stays on the same page and a dialog appears above the page.
The dialogs are just pages which are loaded with a special master page and are therefore completely customizable by users and developers to meet their needs. Following figure shows a new announcement being entered in a dialog over a wiki web page.
Live Preview & Themes
The ability to set a theme for your look and feel within SharePoint is improved. Included is the ability to take your PowerPoint theme and upload and apply it to your SharePoint site.
If you are modifying a web page, you now have Live Preview capability, so you can see how the change will look before you actually accept it.
New Silverlight Web Part
There are times when the user interface needs to provide a level of interactivity that is simply not possible with XHTML technologies. That is where Silverlight steps in. Silverlight is the best way to leverage your .NET development skills in creating rich interactive experiences for the web. SharePoint now includes native support for Silverlight files. Simply develop your Silverlight application (.XAP) and deploy it to the server. You can then add the Silverlight application to your web page by adding the Silverlight web part and providing the location of the .XAP file. The Silverlight application is shown as a part of the page as in the example in following figure.
Empowering the Business
There are a couple of different ways to look at SharePoint 2010. Although the developer perspective is important, maybe the most critical is how it makes the lives of business users easier and lets them do more without the need for IT assistance.
Visio Integration
Use Visio 2010 for documenting and describing business processes? Now you can publish those diagrams directly to SharePoint with the back end connection remaining intact. So the view of the diagram is real time. What's nice about this capability is that not everyone needs to have a license for Visio to see the diagram.
SharePoint Designer 2010
SharePoint Designer 2010 is a fully functional participant in the solution creation lifecycle for SharePoint 2010. Applications can be created with the SharePoint web user interface and with SharePoint Designer 2010 as complete applications. Or they can be packaged into a SharePoint Solution (WSP) file that can be imported into and further edited by Visual Studio 2010. For example a declarative re-usable workflow can be prototyped in SharePoint Designer 2010 and moved in to Visual Studio 2010.
A site dashboard in SharePoint Designer 2010 allows you to see at a glance the basic information about the site. The navigation bar allows you to navigate into more details about the specific lists and libraries. Following figure shows the site dashboard for a site including the basic site information, permissions, and sub-sites.
SharePoint Designer 2010 Business Connectivity Services Design
Workflows operate on SharePoint data – or any data that SharePoint can operate on. Business Connectivity Services extends that reach of workflows and other SharePoint features to data outside of SharePoint. SharePoint Designer 2010 makes the process of defining external entities easy. A wizard guides you through making connections to an external system whether it is Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) Service, a Web Service, a .NET class, or a database. Once the connection is made you will see a list of the entities. By right clicking on the entity you can have SharePoint Designer automatically generate the actions needed to support the entity. Within just a few minutes you can create the connections for all of the tables in your database and connect those to external lists in SharePoint. Figure shows the AdventureWorks customer entity that was created by connecting to the Microsoft SQL Server AdventureWorks sample database.
Search
The addition of FAST to SharePoint gives a much improved search experience. Microsoft says their goal is to help you get the "right results on the first page". Those results include not only SharePoint content, but possibly business data and people — the Rich People Search Function from SharePoint 2007 will comes with SharePoint 2010.
Visit my other blogs also:
Checkpoints for creating Custom Event Handlers
Virtualization Concepts
SharePoint Taxonomy
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